Writing bad Japanese

[eeky]

For people fluent in the respective languages, is it as easy to write bad Japanese as it is to write bad English? I think that writing good English -- even simple English -- is hard. Many (probably most) native speakers are rubbish at it (any present company excepted, of course!) and routinely produce bad grammar, badly structured sentences, bad punctuation and all the rest of it. Sometimes I feel that Japanese is a much more "forgiving" language, in which there are fewer grammatical and structural things to get wrong or do sloppily. But then I wonder if this is just because in Japanese I don't know the difference between good and bad. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is there as much bad Japanese from native Japanese speakers sloshing around on the Internet, for example, as there is bad English from native English speakers?

 

[Mike Cash]

I suspect part of the problem may lie in American schools having for the most part abandoned instruction in English grammar (and spelling), while Japanese students still receive instruction in Japanese grammar and composition. America's "educators" turned out a generation of pupils who think grammar is Grampa's wife, many of whom have gone on to "colledge" with their dismal linguistic skills.

 

[lemonworld]

Personally I find there's an awful lot of bad Japanese around, but I guess it's less obvious because you can't really change the spelling of words in Japanese as much as you can with English, and spelling mistakes are easier to spot (and anyway, the pronunciation of Japanese makes spelling easier than English spelling).

But there's loads of bad grammar around, really. People drop particles and shorten words and use words incorrectly all the time.

However, I do agree that it doesn't seem as bad as it seems to be in America, for example.

 

[Flopjack]

Often it seems to me that poor grammar in other languages (besides English) equates to casual speech while in English you just sound uneducated or something. I purposely talk with broken English with some of my friends during a joke or replicating something like Internet humor, but typically not. Now that I think of it, this is part of why English fluency is probably so difficult. We have rule, yet we break those rules all the time, yet if your word choice or order doesn't "sound quite right" then we know.

 

[lemonworld]

In my opinion, casual speech means bending some grammar rules, both in Japanese and English. However really bad grammar exists both in Japanese and in English. It's not nearly as prominent in Japanese because like I said, you can't change the spellings etc. as much as with English, but yeah. Reading the Japanese of many Japanese people makes me cringe.

 

[richards]

My thoughts are similar to lemonworld's; in a more informal setting (among friends, around the house) the grammar will not necessarily be the same as when you are for example going for a job interview. I had a teacher in highschool that pronounced "guinea fowl" as "gee-na fowl" so the problem in my opinion is often a case of "well at least i can understand you" so spelling and grammar issues are deemed irrelevant.

When you are not a native english speaking person you will often adapt your english to the grammar of your native language and this can also cause quite a few problems in the grammar department.